Skip to Main Content

Listen To An Excerpt

0:00 /

About The Book

A biography of America’s greatest all-around athlete that “goes beyond the myth and into the guts of Thorpe’s life, using extensive research, historical nuance, and bittersweet honesty” (Los Angeles Times), by the bestselling author of the classic biography When Pride Still Mattered.

Jim Thorpe rose to world fame as a mythic talent who excelled at every sport. Most famously, he won gold medals in the decathlon and pentathlon at the 1912 Stockholm Olympics. A member of the Sac and Fox Nation, he was an All-American football player at the Carlisle Indian School, the star of the first class of the Pro Football Hall of Fame, and played major league baseball for John McGraw’s New York Giants. Even in a golden age of sports celebrities, he was one of a kind.

But despite his awesome talent, Thorpe’s life was a struggle against the odds. At Carlisle, he faced the racist assimilationist philosophy “Kill the Indian, Save the Man.” His gold medals were unfairly rescinded because he had played minor league baseball, and his supposed allies turned away from him when their own reputations were at risk. His later life was troubled by alcohol, broken marriages, and financial distress. He roamed from state to state and took bit parts in Hollywood, but even the film of his own life failed to improve his fortunes. But for all his travails, Thorpe survived, determined to shape his own destiny, his perseverance becoming another mark of his mythic stature.

Path Lit by Lightning “[reveals] Thorpe as a man in full, whose life was characterized by both soaring triumph and grievous loss” (The Wall Street Journal).

About The Author

Photograph by Linda Maraniss

David Maraniss is an associate editor at The Washington Post and a distinguished visiting professor at Vanderbilt University. He has won two Pulitzer Prizes for journalism and was a finalist three other times. Among his bestselling books are biographies of Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Roberto Clemente, and Vince Lombardi, and a trilogy about the 1960s—Rome 1960; Once in a Great City (winner of the RFK Book Prize); and They Marched into Sunlight (winner of the J. Anthony Lukas Prize and Pulitzer Finalist in History).

About The Reader

Photograph by Linda Maraniss

David Maraniss is an associate editor at The Washington Post and a distinguished visiting professor at Vanderbilt University. He has won two Pulitzer Prizes for journalism and was a finalist three other times. Among his bestselling books are biographies of Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Roberto Clemente, and Vince Lombardi, and a trilogy about the 1960s—Rome 1960; Once in a Great City (winner of the RFK Book Prize); and They Marched into Sunlight (winner of the J. Anthony Lukas Prize and Pulitzer Finalist in History).

Why We Love It

“A better marriage of subject and author could hardly be imagined. David Maraniss is a prizewinning, bestselling biographer. Jim Thorpe was a great athlete whose story is a paradigm of an era in American history. And although Thorpe never achieved financial success commensurate with his fame, he remained resilient until the day he died. Maraniss knows sports and he knows American history, but most of all, he knows how to tell a great story. This book returns him to the territory of his bestselling biography When Pride Still Mattered.

—Bob B., VP, Executive Editor, on Path Lit by Lightning

Product Details

  • Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio (August 9, 2022)
  • Runtime: 23 hours and 26 minutes
  • ISBN13: 9781442387959

Browse Related Books

Raves and Reviews

"...[Maraniss'] familiarity with the text is a plus for dedicated listeners interested in digging deep into Thorpe's
accomplishments, failures, and triumphs."

– Sue-Ellen Beauregard, Booklist

"Thorpe, who described himself as five-eighths Indian, won the decathlon and pentathlon in the 1912 Olympics in Sweden. The finest football player of his time, he played both professional football and baseball. His roller-coaster life was marked by scandal when his medals were taken away because he had been paid to play semipro baseball. The injustice haunted him. He was surely flawed — thrice married, an absent father, prone to drink — but always a staunch partisan of Native American issues."

– AudioFile Magazien

Resources and Downloads

High Resolution Images

More books from this author: David Maraniss